Hard Drive Enclosures?

[righteous.]

Right now I'm running a storage system of 3.5" internal drives and a dual slot "toaster" dock. Not only does the toaster only backup at USB 2.0 speed, but one of the slots broke, and there was way too much play in the connection. Basically, it's sketchy, slow, and broken, and I want something more solid, but I'd like to keep working with internal drives + enclosures.

Does anyone have any recommendations for some cheaper enclosure systems? I need it to have at least two fast connections; I normally use eSATA for editing, so I would like there to be at least another Firewire 800 for when I backup via time machine.

So far I'm looking at these:
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firew.../Gmax_Portable
http://www.amazon.com/Taurus-Super-S.../dp/B004NGPFNO
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produc...closure_Q.html

As for hard drives...last I checked Samsung was going good. But now I can't seem to find any. Any recommendations for some 1tb drives? I'm willing to spend more to avoid WD. This seems nice:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003IKTATG/...hvptwo=&hvqmt=


Lastly, I'm doing a lot of moving around (college). Are there any advantages to 3.5" drive systems over 2.5" systems or vice versa? If they're essentially the same, I'd like to opt for the smaller option.

[Stephen Mick]

Personally, I like OWC enclosures. You can find them at macsales.com. Specifically, check out their Mercury eSata/FW800 combo enclosures. Rock solid stuff, in my experience.

[righteous.]

Personally, I like OWC enclosures. You can find them at macsales.com. Specifically, check out their Mercury eSata/FW800 combo enclosures. Rock solid stuff, in my experience.

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/MEPQ936AL2/

This is exactly what I'm looking for, I think. Have you had good experiences using this for RAID 1? What type of drives do you recommend? I think I might want to go with a 500gb + 500gb RAID 1 configuration, but according to the specs of the Seagate drives on OWC, the 1TB drives have a 64MB buffer versus the 16MB buffer of the 500gb. Does this mean the 1tb drives will perform better?

OWC says it recommends this for RAID 1 configurations. After factoring the price of the Mercury enclosure + two 500gb drives, this one is only $30 more and apparently has better performance:
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/usb/raid_1/Gmax

I had two Samsung drives mirrored. One of them crashed, and now I'd like to get a replacement backup for it. Do both drives need to be identical models in order for RAID 1 to function, or can I use any other SATA 1tb 3.5" drive as the new backup?